


Dust to Dust

by macneiceisms



Category: His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-14
Updated: 2014-01-14
Packaged: 2018-01-07 15:53:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,554
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1121727
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/macneiceisms/pseuds/macneiceisms
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A small adventure inspired by Pan and Kirjava's secrets, emerging adulthood, and the city in the Northern Lights. Post-Canon Will/Lyra fic</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Letters

Lyra lay in the dark with her heart pounding. It was the middle of the night, and the other girls in her dorm were long asleep and would be until after dawn broke; all silent save for a shift here, a murmur there, a soft snore, a deep and heavy exhale. But Lyra could hear nothing but her own pounding heart. It hammered under the skin of her chest, flushed and damp from the heady heat of June; of the night before Midsummer Day five years after the very first.

And so there were five thick envelopes under her pillow, the alethiometer beside them. One letter for every Midsummer Day. One letter for every year.  She had first begun to write when, two days after her first Midsummer, she had been seized in the middle of the night, a night much like this one, with the terror that she would forget everything and have nothing to tell the Harpies and that she would forget to tell Will everything that had happened to her: all the late nights with her nose in a book, studying geography and theology and Dust and the alethiometer, all the times she saw a tall boy with black hair and her heart sped up and she would nearly call out Will's name but it wouldn't be him because of all the impossible things in all the worlds there ever were, that one was the most impossible.

Each envelope was stuffed with thick sheaves of papers and the odd photogram: her visits to Svalbard, odd facts she learned and everything anyone could possibly know about Dust. She had pages full of things as mundane as the weather, the visits of the Gyptains and the bricklayers of Jordan College. She even talked about the girls she went to school with and how they sat about, how they studied together, had their hearts broken by Oxford boys, and taught Lyra how to braid her hair. In the third letter, there were four whole pages in small handwriting about everything she had learned about Stanislaus Grumman from the witches, from the people of the North, from any book or clipping she could find, from anyone who would tell her. There were two more pages in the fourth letter.

Her letters were filled to the brim with things she wanted to tell him but couldn't because he was worse than far away from her. He was so impossibly close that there were times Lyra imagined that, had they been in the very same world, she would have passed right by him. The sensation always left her breathless, as if something vital were being pulled right out of her. Serafina Pekkala told her to stop tracing every route she had been with Will in his Oxford, but Lyra didn't care those first couple years. All she had wanted was Will; his rare smile, his straight black brows, the sound of his voice.

Lyra's heart was thumping loudly now for two reasons: tomorrow was Midsummer's day and she would try again, this year harder than she had ever tried, to gather enough Dust, to wish and love harder than ever, so that maybe, maybe if she could not ever see him, they might still thin the barrier between their worlds enough to get a stack of letters through. The second was a different sort of anticipation, one that came over her and burned through her when the pain of absence subsided long enough for the memory of touch to ebb in.

With the tips of her fingers and toes nearly humming, she remembered the ghost of Will's hands, down to his two missing fingers. Lyra chastised herself often for not having a better imagination, but she prided herself on how sharp her memory had become. There - there were his lips soft and reverent, peppering her cheek, down her jaw, evolving into lazy and hungry kisses down the column of her throat. And there, a graze of the teeth in the hollow of her collarbone and the smell of his hair against her cheek.

Had she been the girl she was even five years younger, she would have howled from the unfairness of it. _A glimpse of him_ , she would beg the universe, beg Grace, beg Dust, _a word, the sound of his breathing, a scent, whisper. Anything. Anything at all._ It had taken her a year to ask the alethiometer: _is he safe?_

_Yes._

Another year to ask: _will I ever see him?_

 _With trying,_ Lyra had thought it said. Then, half a year: _how can I talk to him?_

 _Summer dust,_ the alethiometer had answered unhelpfully, then the needle swung and stopped on the hourglass with the skull, and swung and stopped there again. Lyra had never hated anything more than that alethiometer in that moment. She had wept and raged and spoken to no but Pantalaimon for days after running off to the Gyptains. If not for Ma Costa and Farder Coram she never would have come back to school. She never would have touched that alethiometer again and she never would have learned that the two swings meant two years, and not two deaths, and that summer dust meant the Dust between them on Midsummer, and not the dust in the grove of the world of the _mulefa,_ the dust of all the souls of the dead.

It was too hot beneath her quilt and sheets and too cold above them. Her feet felt as if they were burning, but when she stuck them out they felt too odd and exposed.

"I wish there was a breeze," Pan said softly in her ear. He was splayed upon his back beside her, his tail tickling her ear.

"I wish I could sleep," Lyra replied. "I wish..."

"I know," said Pan. "I do too."

"Everything reminds me of him. Everything. It's agony," Lyra said in a whisper, her voice breaking. She felt the prick of tears. Pan flicked his tail in her face and Lyra gave a reluctant chuckle when he kept swatting her, fur going up her nose. "You're right, you're right," sighed Lyra. "No use making us miserable. It en't going to change a thing."

It wouldn't do to cry that night. In the hours before dawn, Lyra drifted fitfully to sleep with all of her blankets tossed off, only her sheet around her knees and her nightgown hopelessly twisted. Just as the sun was rising she half woke again to find herself almost cold, and pulling her blanket over her shoulder, she found herself happy. Pan was curled at her neck and his fur rustled once with a delighted shiver; he, like Lyra, was remembering the feel of Will's hand on his fur.

 

Midmorning came and Lyra woke with the summer sun streaming in her eyes. Her stomach was in knots with excitement and unceasing worry. With her hands cold and shaky she put on her stockings and the blue walking dress that had been her mother's.

"Well?" she asked Pantalaimon. Lyra smoothed the front the best she could and straightened her collar.

"You look nice," he replied, settling on her shoulder. Will would not be able to see her while they spent their hour together on that bench, but Lyra dressed her best in spite of all of it. Her mother might have been proud. Lyra even combed her hair out of habit and washed her face and wore Mrs. Coulter's dresses on special occasions from a trunk that had been delivered to her on her sixteenth birthday. They were still loose around her hips and chest, but it was all Lyra had when it came to dresses, and all Lyra had when it came to her mother.

"I hardly recognize me. You suppose Will's going to?"

"He's Will," Pantalaimon reminded her, "Don't be silly."

The last letter she'd written had a photogram of her tucked inside, just to make sure he'd still know her. Lyra knew she would give anything to have a photogram of Will. He would be old enough to have a beard now, and would look more and more like his father.

"One day I'll be tired of you being right."

"You won't," he sniped back, and Lyra tugged on his ear for being smug.

"This year it'll work," Lyra said, sounding tense even to her ears.

"And if it doesn't?" Pan asked, as anxious as Lyra.

"We wait another year."


	2. The Middle of June

At midday on Midsummer Day, on a bench in the Botanical Garden in an Oxford very similar to Lyra's, but very different at once, Will Parry sat in the company of a stack of letters and a cat that prowled back and forth. Will Parry however, did not yet know that he was in the company of a stack of letters. They had not been there when he sat down, and he had not noticed them arrive because at that moment he had been praying with every atom of him that he would see Lyra again while he was alive.

It was the only time of the year he allowed himself to make that wish, though the rest of the year was still devoted to other wishes for her. In the mornings upon waking it was the smell of her hair, breakfast was her laugh, during school was her charm and daring, lunch was her hand in his, dinner her stories, and before sleep it was her mouth, the curve of her neck, her sighs, the rhythm of her breathing. It was everything at once. It was agony. But at Midsummer he allowed himself to forget that it was impossible. He allowed himself to wish in a way he could not wish the rest of the year, when his mother was on his mind nearly as often as Lyra, when he had to sleep and wake and study and help Mary build the Republic of Heaven and remember all the time to be kind and cheerful and good like Lyra had said.

Will Parry did not know that the very reason he had not noticed the letters was the reason they had arrived: he had prayed and wished for Lyra, loved Lyra with every atom and after five years of nothing but silence and longing and hope after wrecked hope, Grace had been granted.

“Will,” he heard Kirjava hiss, and he started, opening his eyes. The sky was overcast and the air as thick as soup. Will wiped a bit of sweat from his brow and looked to the usually silent cat that had jumped lightly onto the bench beside him. “Will, look,” she said again, pawing a stack of letters on the bench beside him that Will was absolutely sure had not been there before.

His heart gave an impossible lurch. There, in looped handwriting he had never seen before but knew, in much the same way he knew Lyra was here on her own bench, was his name beneath a knot of twine.

_Will Parry_

_Oxford_

His fingers never felt clumsier than when he tried to untie the knot, and finding that his hands were shaking too hard, he resigned to clutch the stack of letters very hard, lest they vanish. And so Will sat there in his Oxford with his heart beating very hard in his chest for the rest of the hour with Lyra. He thanked her with all of his heart: she must have spent all those years trying to find a way to get these through. There were five in all and each envelope heavy, the stack as thick as his curled fist. Will had known she would find a way. She was Lyra, impossible, brave and wondrous Lyra, and all because of her he now had a handful of letters from her. Letters! Will thought he must be shaking from joy; every atom of him trembling. He could read them again and again; add every word she wrote to the space in his memory committed to everything about her.

“How did she do it?” Kirjava asked, sniffing and rubbing her head against the letters. They smelled like Lyra, and like Pan too.

“I don’t know,” he whispered hoarsely. “But she did. Because she’s Lyra.”

 

Mary walked home with a heavy heart that evening from her laboratory, taking time to go to the Tesco’s and pick up milk and bread and some chocolates. Then on second thought, she bought a bottle of wine to nurse while Will stayed shut in his room for the evening. He would go to school the next morning in silence and Mary would return again, to silence. He would hardly speak to her and hardly eat, and Mary suspected that he did not sleep much either. Picking up a Merlot with a sigh, she thought that Will ought to learn to take care of himself better in the days after meeting Lyra in the Botanical Garden, or at least let Mary take care of him. Lyra would have sorted out all this sulking a long while ago if she could have. He was a willful boy, and now that he was eighteen he was more stubborn than ever.

The flat they shared above a dentist’s office was dark save for a light in the kitchen. It was odd, but Mary did not think much of it save for a brief hope that Will had returned from the land of the half dead to begin dinner. Her stomach grumbled. The key stuck in the lock a bit, as it always did, and the stairs on the way up squeaked in their familiar way, but when Mary came in she found something very extraordinary. Will sat at the kitchen table, surrounded by papers with small looping handwriting all over them. There were black and white photographs, some a bit brown. But this was not the remarkable thing. Will was sitting, at the kitchen table, beaming at Mary and wiping tears from his very red face.

“Look at her,” Will said, sniffling a bit, and pushed a photograph across the table. Mary gasped. It was Lyra. There was no mistaking the shining mess of dark blonde hair, that crooked smile, and the little scar above her eye.

“She’s older,” said Mary, unbelieving. “It’s Lyra, but older.”

“She says she had it taken only a month ago. That’s her, Mary. That’s Lyra.”

Mary Malone had to set her Tesco bags down on the floor and sit, exhaling heavily. “Is this all from her?” she asked, looking at all the stacks of papers.

“All of it. Five years of letters she was writing me.”

“You got them today? How?”

“I was sitting on our bench and they just...appeared.”

A thought just began to form in Mary’s mind and she dashed off to her room. It was a mess of clothes and books and papers and trunks, but in one she found what she was looking for: a crude spyglass of bamboo and amber resin. When Mary looked through it, pointing the spyglass at her own kitchen table, what she saw made her gasp, much like the very first time she had ever seen Shadows or Dust or _sraf_. But she had never seen Dust this dense. In every letter and photograph, from corner to corner, on every sheaf of paper, the very fibers seemed to glow, Dust crowding and moving. The strongest glow, however, was Will’s. Mary put the spyglass down and swore, as she would to her grave, that in that moment she could see it with her own eyes.

“That’s how she must have done it,” Mary whispered, sitting down once more across from Will. “All that Dust...”

“She said something about that in the fourth letter,” Will piped, bright eyed. Oh, he would break Mary’s heart all over again. If only he could look so happy all the time, and not half a corpse. Mary imagined Lyra would be one for bouts of weeping and then days of being alright, but Will wore his grief on his shoulders day in and day out, passing through life a half-mourner. There was only room in his heart for his mother, Lyra, and Mary and Lyra’s place was doomed to be a wound unhealing as his hand had once been.

Mary had her own moments, so she did not begrudge Will his pain. The mulefa wouldn’t have any use of letters or even postcards or photographs. Would Atal have found a mate now? Would she have children of her own? Did she miss Mary as Mary missed her? But Will’s shuffling pulled her out of her thoughts of Atal, and he then began to read from one of Lyra’s letters:

“ _...I said I was going back to Svalbard, where the bears live, and now I’m here. Iofur’s palace is long gone, and the bears live like Iorek says they ought to: as bears, and not humans. I saw the Aurora, Will, and I saw Cittàgazze again within them. I’m staying in my father’s old cell because that’s as close to human lodging the bears have anymore. All of Lord Asriel’s things were there - his notes and photograms; everything just like the picture I saw in the Reading Room. He went across without the subtle knife. He opened a door where there was enough Dust to get through. No specters! No windows! But it’s tricky, and you need enough energy and enough Dust. Iorek says that I shouldn’t think about door anymore than I should think about windows, but Pantalaimon says I should keep looking. He’s usually telling me to leave it, to stop looking and keep to my studies and look for a real occupation, but this time he isn’t. He’s secretive like that sometimes. I love you, Will. With every atom of-_ ” Will stopped reading, swallowed thickly, then looked for another page.

_“I think I have an idea, Will, and I’m going to try it when we see each other again. I took a photogram of all these letters, and used the same solution Lord Asriel did when he developed those photos I saw in the Reading Room. There’s Dust all over them! I thought there might be - everything humans make has Dust. We create it by living and telling stories. You wouldn’t believe how much Dust even an ordinary novel has! Well, I’m thinking, there just might be enough Dust in these letters to get them to you. Our Oxfords overlap perfectly, and I know you and I both have a lot of Dust. Maybe you’ll even read this soon! Oh, if you do, you must write back to me. I want to know everything. Everything you have done, what you look like now, how Mary and your mother are doing. Oh, and a photogram of you! You of course have those in your world, I’ve seen them. Your mother had pictures of your father in those letters of his. I still have them. No harm’s come to them. All I know is that you’re safe. The alethiometer told me. It took me forever to get even that much.”_

Will fell silent again, reading what followed with a look of tenderness and ferocity that was Lyra's and Lyra's alone.

 

That night Will lay in bed with his heart beating loudly in his chest. He felt as if only now he were really living. Really, truly living, and not just taking one unconscious step after another. That was not to say he had not been happy since he and Lyra had separated. Every smile his mother gave him, every day that she listened with her bright and fearless eyes was a day he could find himself completely content, and a day he could find himself smiling. Who else could he have told his impossible story to? Why else was he going to school, if not to help her in every capacity he could?

But just as the knuckles of the two missing fingers on his left hand still ached when he stretched his hand, the ghost of nerves still crying out and the tendons still there missing the digits they once attached to, there was a part of him that ached for Lyra just as often. It ached when it was cold, because he would remember Iorek Byrnison and so he would think of Lyra. It ached in summer, when it would be close to June, because it would be time to be with her on that bench. It ached when the weather was heavy with fog; it ached on bright balmy days; it ached in cafes and in company and when he was with Mary and when he was alone. The wound on his heart would not heal. Lyra’s letters had been like bloodmoss; every molecule of his heart sighing in relief.

“I suppose you should catch up,” Kirjava whispered from where she lay curled in a near perfect circle by his side.

“Catch up?”

“Well, she wrote you five years of letters and you never wrote a damn thing.”

There was something angry in her eyes and something amused as well, like a parent scolding a child for a particularly impossible mess. Will relished in it for a moment before scratching her behind the ears.

“Where do I start?”

“Wherever you like. But you have to start.”


End file.
